Forever & Always
by r4ven3
Summary: Set almost 2 years post-Ruth's death. Harry is attempting to move on, but is his heart in it? A little schmaltzy in places. One-shot.


_**A/N: This is not terribly original in parts. I may have unconsciously absorbed some aspects of others' post-S.10 stories, so if I have, I apologise in advance. I just had to write it, knowing it's good to step outside one's comfort zone occasionally. **_

* * *

"_The tears I feel today  
I'll wait to shed tomorrow.  
Though I'll not sleep this night  
Nor find surcease from sorrow.  
My eyes must keep their sight:  
I dare not be tear-blinded.  
I must be free to talk  
Not choked with grief, clear-minded.  
My mouth cannot betray  
The anguish that I know.  
Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:  
But my grief will never go."  
― _Anne McCaffrey, _Dragonsinger _

* * *

He is late again. She knows why this is, and she accepts it …... or so she tells herself. This is their seventh date (if, in fact what they've been sharing in a kind of chaste companionship could be termed dating), and he has been late for each one. This is the first of their meetings that he has initiated, and he is already twenty minutes late. That sets a poor precedent, she knows, but what bothers her the most is that apart from the occasional peck on the cheek, there has been no physical contact of any kind. He's told her he's not married, and she can guarantee he's not gay. He radiates sexual energy that can be detected by every heterosexual woman in a room, and yet she's sure he is unaware of the effect he has on women, or perhaps he is simply disinterested, and she finds that intriguing.

Harry Pearce is a puzzle Helen Winstanley is determined to solve.

Just as she has decided to forget about him, and to move on, he is striding across the restaurant towards her. Watching the way his body moves, she feels the familiar warmth of longing deep in her belly. She wants him, and her quest for now is to make him want her. As he approaches her table, she is aware of the eyes of other women in the restaurant furtively checking him out, and again she is reeled in, a fish about to be caught. It is not so much what he does, but the way in which he does it. He walks like he knows what he wants, and how to get it. He is dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt and red tie. It appears he has come straight from work, which would account for his lateness.

"Sorry, I should have phoned you," he says, reaching across to plant a kiss on her cheek. There is no affection in the kiss, and even the spoken apology sounds practised and insincere, like verbal musak.

"Do you really want to be here, Harry?" she asks.

"Of course. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I was held up."

They'd first met at the conference on Africa, held in Hampshire. At Macefield manor. The irony of the name had not escaped Harry. He'd half expected the reptilian Oliver to emerge from deep within one of the heavily stuffed armchairs just in time for dinner, but the four days passed, thankfully, Mace-less. Section D had covered the security, and Helen had been the South African delegate – an Englishwoman working for the South African embassy in London. Born in Cape Town, and sent to boarding school in England at age 11, she had never left to return to live in the country of her birth. She was attractive, smartly dressed, well-spoken and well-read, and she had made a beeline for him. Harry knew he should have turned down her first invitation to dinner, but he had been flattered by her attention, and curious about where it would lead. By the third date, he'd felt awkward about saying no to her, and by the sixth meeting he was beginning to enjoy her company. He quite liked her, even admired her, but was never going to be able to love her. He still loved …...

He'd had Helen Winstanley vetted after their third date. Apart from a rather active three years in student politics while attending Cambridge in the 1970's, she came up clean. Married for nineteen years to South African politician, Pieter Valkenburg, before being widowed five years earlier, her life was free from blemish. She had no children. She should have made the perfect partner for Harry Pearce. On paper she was the ideal woman. It's just that the ideal woman …...

"I'm not used to men standing me up," she was saying.

"I've never stood you up."

"Not yet."

"Were I to do so, I'd let you know. I'd ring you."

"So," she says, her eyes narrowing as she attempts to stare him down, "there is still a chance you will?"

"Of course. You know the job I do."

"I suppose this is the reason you've remained single for so long, Harry."

"One of them."

The remainder of the dinner passes awkwardly. It is clear Harry's head is not present, and his heart is locked away where no-one will touch it ever again. Despite that, he enjoys her company, and would like to spend more time with her. It's just that …...

"Shall we go back to yours or mine?" she asks once they are in his car.

"Yours, I think," he replies.

"I've never even seen your place, Harry."

He says nothing in reply. Why bother? He won't ever take her back there. He simply can't.

They are drinking coffee in her living room, and he is sitting on the sofa, while she perches on the edge of a Queen Anne chair on the opposite side of the small table. This is the first time he's been inside her home, and nothing about it surprises him. It is modest, but elegantly furnished, with carpeted floors, rather than the polished wood floors in his own house. Harry knows that something is expected to happen between them on this night.

"Have you seen someone about your depression, Harry?" she asks, completely out of the blue. He has made an effort to keep the attention and the conversation well away from him. His own personal life – his past – is not a topic open for discussion. Whenever she has asked him anything about his personal life he has deflected her questions. He hasn't even told her that he has two adult children.

"I hadn't known I was depressed."

"Something is wrong, of that I'm sure. I know I'm not unattractive, and I'm able to hold up my side of a conversation, I'm single and I'm free, and I'm offering myself to you, but you're apparently not interested."

"And that means I'm depressed?"

"Not at all, but it is strange." Helen hesitates, putting down her cup and saucer. "You emanate a sadness, Harry. It's quite deep-seated, too, I'd say. Have you lost someone? You said you're divorced, but there's something else. Tell me."

Harry waits for her to say more, then he sighs heavily. "Almost two years ago, I lost someone I loved very dearly. We had only just planned a life together, away from the security services, and she …... she died. I'm not prepared to say any more than that."

"Thank you, Harry, for trusting me. Two years is quite a long time -"

"To me, it feels like two days. Some days it feels like two hours, and when I wake up each morning, it feels like two minutes since she died."

"For a long time after Pieter died, I felt that way, but I'd had time to prepare for his death. He'd had cancer for eighteen months prior to his death, so I'd already been grieving for some time before he passed." Helen looks down at her hands, folded and resting on her elegant knees. "I'd like to offer you some …... comfort, Harry. Pieter and I had a very active sex life, and I miss that. I'm attracted to you – as a man – and I'd like to sleep with you." She gives a small laugh, embarrassment evident in her face, her absence of eye contact. "I've never had to proposition a man before. It's usually me having to fight them off. She must have been very special, this woman you lost."

"She was. There will never again be anyone like her."

Helen stands up and moves around the table to sit next to Harry, so close that their knees are touching. "I'm not asking that you see me as a replacement for her, Harry. She will always be your one true love, I can see that. I just think that sometimes …... sometimes the oblivion of sex can help in the healing process."

Harry wants to throw his head back and laugh. He is aware of how ironic are her words. Here he sits beside an attractive woman who is offering herself to him, and all he can think of is the woman he still loves, but with whom he never got to make love. He turns to face Helen, and decides that it is time he moved on. He reaches out to her, and takes her face in his hands.

The kiss is long and quite nice, rather sweet, and Helen is not pushing him. When their mouths open, their tongues flick forward, sparring with the tongue of the other. His hand drifts down to her breast, and he rubs his thumb along the outside of the thin material of her dress, while with one hand Helen begins to open the buttons of his shirt, while her other hand seeks contact with his slowly growing arousal.

"Upstairs," she says, and he stands up and follows her, surprised that his body is expressing excitement, when he is thinking of what is about to happen as something he _must_ do …... to prove to himself that he is still capable as much as anything else.

He cannot think of what they are doing together as lovemaking. It is sex, pure and simple. It is a burying of a part of one body inside another for the express purpose of a fleeting moment of pleasure, and a reminder that they are alive, each of them the ones left behind, and so having to pick up the pieces of their lives and keep going. As much as his sex-starved and love-starved body soaks up the attention of her hands and mouth, his heart is separate from this act. His heart is what he shared with _her_ – all too briefly – and as such, he must keep it pure. It still belongs with _her_. It is good, this sex with Helen, his body enjoys it, and he closes his eyes and allows himself to become lost within the brief rush his body is experiencing. For once, he doesn't concern himself with the enjoyment of his partner.

Afterwards, while they lay together exhausted, the depression again sets in. For those minutes while he was moving inside Helen, he'd allowed himself to be caught up in an animal lust of seeking the brief unconsciousness which follows release, the long moments when the future is so far removed to be of no real concern, and the past cannot be remembered, as if it had never existed at all. It is in that long suspension of time – that hiatus – that he is no longer depressed, no longer still grieving, no longer a shell of a man simply going through the motions of living.

After his breathing has settled and his body is relaxed, and that hiatus has been passed, he feels such overwhelming guilt that he almost weeps from the weight of it.

"I can't do this again," he says quietly into the air. He withdraws his arm from around Helen, and pulls his body away from her.

"I won't see you again, will I?" she asks.

"No, you won't, and it's not just that we've done this and I've got what I came for …... because this isn't why I've been seeing you. I wasn't looking for sex."

"I know."  
"I'm sorry, Helen. You're a really nice woman, but ..."

"Don't say any more. Go on, go," she says quietly, but not unkindly, "but don't allow the rest of your life to be spent living amongst your memories of her. You have a lot to give the right person, Harry."

"I can't do it any other way. I don't know how. We wasted so much time, she and I."

"Then don't allow yourself to waste any more time," Helen says.

He thinks that perhaps he should kiss her goodbye, but he can't even do that. As he dresses, and Helen lies in bed watching him, he wonders whether he used her, or perhaps she was using him. Maybe it was a bit of both.

He drives home feeling sad and sorry – for himself, about to spend another night alone in his own bed – but chiefly for he and Ruth, for what they were never brave enough to share together, for them believing they had plenty of time left in which to get it right. Stripped to his underwear and lying in bed, chasing sleep, he stares at the ceiling, wondering how long it will be before he feels differently from the way he feels now. He has always been comfortable in his own company, but he has never felt more alone in the world, more bereft of another's company than he has these past twenty-three months. He knows that there are people in his life who care about him, and who mean well when they suggest he go out in an effort to `meet people'. He has met a lot of people these past twenty-three months, but none of them are a slightly-built brunette with an engaging smile, captivating eyes, a nervous disposition, a devastating intellect, and an ability to at once challenge him and surprise him. There has only ever been one like her, and now she is gone.

* * *

Next morning – Friday – he wakes early, has breakfast, gets in his car and drives to the cemetery, having bought a bunch of flowers at the florist two blocks from his house. He walks down the rows of graves until he comes to the one he has visited each Friday morning for the past twenty-three months. For the first two months he'd visited every day, often staying until dark, until his daughter had suggested he cut it down to once a week, and then keep it at that. She'd suggested he spend more time with the living and less with the dead, and as hard as it had been to do at the time, she'd been right. It's just that his heart still belonged with a dead woman, as it still does, and he doubts that will ever change.

After placing the flowers in one of the empty vases he'd found next to a tap, he runs his finger over the lettering of her name, saying it aloud. He knows she won't come back to him, but he needs to believe they are still connected. It was their powerful connection while she was living which had motivated him to get out of bed each morning, prepared to face the horrors that came with his job. She had made everything worth it. Without her he feels lost and alone in the world, a revolving moon without its planet.

"Ruth," he says, "Ruth, I'm sorry. I was trying to move on, but …... I wasn't very good at it. I couldn't …..." _I was unfaithful to you_, he thinks, unable to say the words aloud.

And then, for the first time since the day she'd died, he begins to cry. His sobs are so debilitating, so gut-heaving that he drops to his knees, and leans forward, his hands resting on the edge of her grave. He cries out the pain of losing her, of missing her every moment of his waking life, his sadness at having to live out what remains of his life without her, and his regret at having let so many opportunities pass them by. A passer-by – a woman in her late 70's – stops beside him, her hand hovering just above his shuddering shoulders, expresses concern for him. "Are you alright, dear?" Her easy use of the endearment brings another bout of sobs from his throat. He nods, even though it is clear he is a very long way from being alright, and would likely be that way for some time to come. He will never again be alright, but that is the way it is, the way it has to be, from now until he draws his last breath on earth.

He cries himself out, and remarkably, he feels a little better for it. Before he leaves, he says the same thing he says every Friday morning.

"I love you, Ruth, and I will love you forever ... and always." He touches his fingers to his lips, and then places them on her name, engraved for eternity in her headstone.

And then he turns and leaves.

* * *

Back on the Grid, Harry prepares for his last three months as Section Head of Section D. In a little over a month he turns 60, and although he is not being forced to retire, he can see signs that the time for his kind of leadership has passed. The security services have become more political, more slick, more sound bites than genuine substance, and he is now being viewed as a dinosaur. It is time for him to move on. Perhaps he'll travel. There is much in the world he has yet to see. He'd always dreamed of travelling with her. Their last conversation had been about the retirement they were planning to spend together. They, who had been so close in their working lives, had planned to spend the rest of their lives together in peace and love, and surely some of that would have been spent travelling.

He'll travel anyway, and perhaps she'll find a way to be with him in spirit. For his part, he will imagine she is with him every step of the way.

.


End file.
